Market share doesn't matter, for the most part. Apple's iPhone
sales have continued to grow, even as it lost market share.

BI Intelligence

The only way that market share matters is if developers use it as
guide post for their decisions. If you're making software, you
want as many people as possible exposed to your software. To do
that, you would have to develop for Android, which has more
users.

If developers focused on Android, then Apple's iPhone software,
iOS, would become second-class. It would have weaker apps. As a
weaker platform, it would be less attractive, and then the iPhone
business would collapse.

But, that hasn't happened. In part, it's because Apple has more
valuable users.

During the Black Friday shopping period,
Adobe reported, "iOS users drove four times as much mobile
sales revenue as Android users, 79 and 21 percent respectively."

In general, iPhone users are more engaged with apps, and
more willing to pay for apps.

As a result, developers have not bailed. They've done the
opposite. They're building for iOS first, and Android second,
despite the market share
disparity.

It seems like the only way for Apple to fix this market
share "problem" is to lower prices to sell more phones, but that
would put pressure on Apple's profits, which would hurt its
stock. So, to these people, Apple is stuck between a rock and a
hard place.

AP

Apple is not too thrilled with all of this debate. It hates that
people fixate on its one weak point when so much else is going
well.

And, apparently, Apple executives think the data people are
using for market share is junk.

Buried in
a Walt Mossberg column on Apple and Google is this tiny
nugget, with our emphasis added: "In my conversations
with Apple executives, they vehemently insist that market share
isn’t — and won’t be — their goal, and even go so far as to say
that most public market-share numbers are somehow off the
mark, though they decline to explain how."

That's all Mossberg says. There is nothing further on
it.

But it would make sense for Apple to question the numbers.
Apple is the only company that openly reports its smartphone
sales. Every other company keeps that information private,
forcing companies like IDC and Gartner to use their own imperfect
methods to track smartphone shipments.

Shipments do not equal sales through to
consumers. Just ask
Samsung, which has a built up inventory of the Galaxy S5.
Shipments to consumers don't necessarily mean usage.

Unfortunately for Apple,
there's not much it can do. If it has evidence the numbers are
wrong then it can present that data. But that gets complicated,
especially since this is a relatively minor issue in the big
picture. Apple tries to counterprogram this narrative when it
talks about web usage, which shows
Android and iOS even at this point.

The best thing for Apple to do,
though, is to keep doing what it's been doing. It doesn't get too
hung up on market share data. It just sells expensive phones to
millions of people. That leads to developers making great apps,
and the share price soaring.